Tech billionaire Steve Ballmer spent $10 million to disprove a 'rancorous' belief about Democrats and Republicans

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Tech billionaire Steve Ballmer thinks it's high time that the US works together to solve our issues.

The former Microsoft CEO, and current LA Clippers owner, is single-handedly trying to get the nation back to a common sense discussion on government-based on facts.

He shelled $10 million of his own money to build a website called USAFacts, which takes the government's own data on everything from crime to taxes and makes it available, and digestible, to ordinary citizens.

But, as Americans know these days, there seems to be a war on facts, where things that are probably untrue are presented to people as if they were facts.

So, Ballmer and his USAFacts team commissioned an online poll, conducted by Harris Insight and Analytics, to survey thousands of Americans from all states, rural and urban, and ask them their thoughts about facts. Over 2,500 Americans participated in the poll, evenly split between Democrats, Republicans, independents, and across age groups.

Steve Ballmer
Business Insider
The shocking news: there is nearly uniform consensus across every affiliation and demographic on the nature of government facts. People get their facts from similar places, agree on the sources to question, and desire to learn more facts about the same issues.

When Ballmer saw the results, he was "heartened," he tells Business Insider.

"In the daily rancorous world of politics, you would think, some days, that people can't agree on anything. But people in various ages and political situations all seem to be interested in understanding the facts. And all have some view that if you can get informed, you can get closer together."

The poll uncovered a number of surprising tidbits that show just how closely aligned Americans really are when it comes to facts about government.

The poll surveyed 2,521 people evenly spit across age groups, political affiliations (Democrats/Republicans/independents), rural/urban areas. So it pretty fairly represents people from all walks of American life.

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The poll found that Republicans, Democrats and independents prefer facts and figures about their government, rather than stories and anecdotes, with at least 88% in every affiliation agreeing on this.

If people have qualms trusting their current sources of government information, where do they want their information to come from?

Nearly everyone wants government information to be based on data (over 90% of Democrats and Republicans) and they want it to come from a non-partisan source (over 81% across the board).

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Data verified by academic institutions is trusted more by Democrats than by Republicans. Data verified by the media is more trusted by Democrats than Republicans and data verified by businesses are slightly more trusted by Republicans than by Democrats.

Here's the breakdown by political affiliation:

Yet, people from all party affiliations also agree that we need to use the same data to have "informed debates about the future of our country."

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Here's the breakdown by political affiliation:

Democrat: 89%

Republican: 90%

No party affiliation: 86%

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As for the political issues that Americans want to see more government data on, at the top of everyone's list is health care, the economy, and taxes (over 90% on each of these across all political affiliations).

Other topics of interest in which respondent prefer more facts and less rhetoric: Social Security and Medicare, which scored at nearly 90% or above across all affiliations.

Americans are least interested in government data about marriage and divorce (below 50% across all political affiliations).

Americans are concerned that we aren't doing a good enough job educating our kids on how our government works and how citizens can participate. More than 75% of every respondents across political affiliations believe civic education is fair or poor. Just 23% said it was good or excellent.